What do people mean when they call a novel 'Dickensian'? A large cast of vividly drawn characters, some of them grotesques with comically descriptive names and odd tics of speech and behavior; a plucky orphan who overcomes a childhood blighted by humiliating poverty or simple lower-class misery; numerous and ingeniously interconnected subplots; panoramic shifts of location; a narrative that makes the reader finish each chapter eager to begin the next. But like 'Kafkaesque', 'Dickensian' is only a partial description of the writer's work. Often missing from so-called Dickensian novels are the aspects of Dickens - his originality, his intelligence, his witty and precise descriptions, the depth and breadth of his powers of observation, his cadenced, graceful language - that can temper the urgency of our impulse to keep reading with the desire to read passages aloud, preferably to another person.
